We first brought you news on Blinkist back in January, delving deep into the reading subscription service that helps you get to grips with books in fifteen minutes. It’s all about manual curation, as experts in their specialized fields with a passion for explaining complex matters, provide abridged, ‘condensed’ versions of non-fiction titles that can be read quickly.
Back then, it was only available on the Web and on iPhone, but following its arrival for iPad back in March, it’s finally landed on Android too.
How it looks
Blinkist for Android pretty much follows the same layout as that of its iOS brethren – you can peruse what’s new, by category or what’s hand-picked by Blinkist.
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You can then add books to your reading list, with Blinkist informing you in advance how long it should take to finish – you’ll see in the top right-hand corner a figure such as ’14 minutes’ or ’17 minutes’.
Given that all the included books are summarized from scratch, this manual approach means it only has around 400 books at the time of writing, though 40 new titles are being added each month. To give you an idea of what kind of books you’ll find in there, there’s everything from Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, to Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, and the 2005 classic Freakonomics.
Since we last caught up with the Berlin-based company, its pricing structure has been tweaked too. Now, beyond your initial 3-day trial period, you’ll have to pay $7.99 (USD) €6.99 (EUR)/£5.49 (GBP) per month; $14.99 (USD)/€13.99 (EUR)/£10.49 (GBP) a quarter; or $49.99 (USD)/€44.99 (EUR)/£34.99 (GBP) annually.
Blinkist claims 140,000 registered users have downloaded more than 1.5 million books since the platform launched first in Germany in early 2013.
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